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Modding
From Hellgatewiki.com
"Modding" has two meanings for gaming fans, and three meanings in Hellgate: London.
- Mods in the game are small objects like fuel tanks, batteries, and sacred relics that can be socketed into weapons to improve their function. See the Mods page in this wiki.
- Mods also refer to modules, player-designed programs that improve or modify the game's default GUI (Graphical User Interface.) More on those below.
- Mods are also a gaming term for user-modified versions of the game. The most famous mod is probably Counter Strike, a hugely-popular player-created modification of Half Life, but there were innumerable mods made from Diablo and Diablo II, and there will surely be mods made from Hellgate; London as well. More on those below.
Contents |
Mods
Mods are user-created themes or bots that make playing the game easier by streamlining the controls and hotkey functions. Our sister World of Warcraft site hosts hundreds of these, and if there's a demand for them from Hellgate: London players, we'll host them here as well. How easy they'll be to create remains to be seen.
"We aren’t planning on releasing mod tools, chiefly because of the secured online component of Hellgate: London. There are certain aspects of the game where we do anticipate players creating their own content – such as in ways to track information, alter the UI and so forth. As for altering graphics, changing game play and so forth, this is something we just can’t do since we are an MMO in terms of our online support. It won’t surprise me to see players create their own single-player content, or multiplayer content that doesn’t alter the core play experience. In either case, we aren’t currently planning on providing specific support to enable this. We also haven’t had any discussions about specifically preventing it – except in the case of the secured online play, of course."
--Bill Roper, October 2006, Strategy Informer interview.
Weapon Mods
Complicating things is the Hellgate Team's decision to call their rune-like socketable trinkets "mods." Full coverage of those essential items on our Mods page.
Mod Making
Mod-making is the practice of players accessing what they can of the game code, and changing things around. At its simplest level, modders fiddle with the values in the game data spreadsheets, making monsters faster, or stronger, or simply changing their names and colors. Character skills can be tweaked as well, as can item drops, item stats and names, and almost anything else you can think of. Higher level modding involves inserting new animations and graphics into games, inventing new skills, and much, much more. Skilled mod-makers create themed mods, like the famous Middle-Earth mod for Diablo II, which gave the game a decidedly Tolkien theme.
There were a tremendous amount of very good Diablo II mods, despite the fact that it wasn't a very easy game to mod. Modding was not very well-supported in Diablo II, (although it got easier with the v1.10 and v1.11 patch) mostly due to the 2D sprite graphics, which were virtually impossible to tweak. 3D graphics are much easier to modify, and most FPS games have allowed players to make new skins for their characters, design levels, play with weapon values, and more.
What about modders? No plans exist to make the game openly moddable -- after all, the game is all about randomized levels, Still, Roper expects some to try.
--CGW Magazine Preview, May 2006
This is kind of a misleading quote, since hardly any Diablo II mods messed with the level layouts. That's the kind of thing that's popular in FPS modding, where players design their own arenas for deathmatches. It's not what players are interested in when it comes to RPG modding, where the fun is in tweaking monster behavior, adding new items, modifying player skills, and so forth. We don't know anything about how easy or hard Hellgate: London will be to mod in that way, but Diablo and Diablo II were not easy games to mod, and there were still countless quality mods produced. If Hellgate: London is popular, mods will follow.
Interestingly, Flagship has made a few statements hinting that players might not even want to mod, since Hellgate: London's online options will be so cool.
"We're not sure if we will, or can, provide the type of support that players see from FPS games. We know that mod-makers had a lot of fun creating variants on the Diablo II game play and items, but our online plans are more detailed and grand in scope than what we ever did for Diablo II. Again, think more along the lines of what you get from an MMORPG than and FPS, or even Diablo II in this regard."
--Bill Roper, Fansite Interview, January 2, 2006
We don't have any more details about this yet, but you can bet we're eager to hear more. Regardless of what they do with the online game though, I can't imagine mod makers not wanting to make mods. Some players enjoy mucking around with the game code and seeing what they can change far more than they enjoy actually playing the game, and that's never going to change.
Online Fees?
Modding might become an issue with Hellgate: London depending on how the online fees work out. We still don't know (as of February 2007) exactly what pricing model Hellgate: London online is going to be sold under, but we do know that some basic online game experience will be available for free. Other stuff, including extra dungeons and items, along with bonus features like guild support, trading, ladder rankings, PvP arenas, raid instances, and so on may be only available online, for a fee.
If the best stuff is behind a fee wall, mod-makers might include the same content in free mods that everyone could play. How feasible this will be, and how happy Flagship will be about it, remains to be seen.
